Telepathy Discussion

5 days ago

It occurs to me that a lot of people are going to try and keep good permanents in their hand, so you can't steal them. The way around that is to know what is in their hand, and steal it from there anyways.

Telepathy
tells you what is there, and makes your counterspells much more useful.

Alhammarret, High Arbiter
is funny because his ability continues to work even if you give him to someone else. Politics wise, he can help to rebalance the board, taking one player's big threat out of the game while giving the weaker player a 5/5 Flying blocker.

Chandra Ablaze
gives you amazing hand control combined with Zedruu. She forces your opponents to discard all the cool stuff they've been holding, and then you draw a bunch of cards on your next upkeep with Zedruu to keep the resources imbalanced in your favor.

2 weeks ago

our playgroup isn't the kind that thinks Mana Crypt s, Force of Will s, and its ilk are auto-includes in all decks.

_However, I feel like the consistent card-draw stapled to her would make the deck too powerful and consistent. _

Estrid, the Masked is too good. There, I said it.

having a tutor in the command zone tends to make the games too consistent and predictable;

The second stipulation is that the deck is tuned for Primal Surge . With only 6 instant and sorceries in the deck including the surge itself, you should (approximately) get about 20 cards off of each Primal Surge. Since 1-card wincons are incredibly uninteresting as far as I'm concerned, I don't think the deck will reach a point where Primal Surge is the only instant or sorcery.

Probably the best card draw in the deck. Perhaps too good.

The amount of mana this card can produce for one mana can become unfair. Perhaps this should only be in cEDH.

I refuse to build 0 instant/sorcery Primal Surge . The idea of making it a 1-card wincon is uneventful to me. I'd much rather have the drama and variance of not knowing how many cards (or which cards) I am going to hit.

I don't think min-maxing means what you think it means. Intentionally not using cards because they are good or not building your deck a certain way because its too reliable for winning is the exact opposite of min-maxing. I will never understand the aversion of new players to winning, but I will review your deck in good faith nonetheless.

First, your land usage is definitely not optimal. You correctly identified the usefulness of fetches and duals for 4 color decks, but you chose not to run them (they are $$$ in real life dollars, so understandable). Regardless, you should prioritize lands that 1. Enter untapped and 2. Give access to the colors you need. A large number of your lands fail this metric.

Second, you run a number of cards that are 1. Expensive to cast and 2. Don't do much for the mana cost. Specifically, I am looking at
Sandwurm Convergence
Mind's Dilation
, and all the Hondens. Sandwurm convergence is an underwhelming effect for a whopping 8 mana, stopping flyers is negligible because most EDH decks are built to win by combo. The 5/5 at your end step is nice, but the two effects combined are not worth the investment of 8 mana.
Mind's Dilation
is similarly heavy to cast at 7, but is even less worthwhile because it requires your opponents to do something before it does anything for you. You also aren't guaranteed to get value from it, because opponents can hit lands, they can hit spells you can't use (counterspells and removal come to mind). The hondens are bad because they require a heavy investment of mana and cards to start producing anything worthwhile. They also rob you of 4 deck slots that could go towards something more productive for winning. You are never going to get all 4 of the Hondens onto the board in a timely manner because your ramp cards are so low quality and you have almost no card tutors, plus slow and passive draws. Also no, 4 Hondens on turn 10 is not good.

Your interaction is. . . bad.
Sunken Field
will only work on bad players. Comboing it with untap effects would be interesting, but right now its just a very very very weak and predictable counterspell. You know how you are singing the praises of
Telepathy
? You are giving your opponents the same information about your disruption while gaining no extra benefits from having it be in that form. Its also costs you 3 mana to use it the first time (2 to cast, and 1 more from tapping the land it enchants), meanwhile there are a whole host of 2 and 3 mana counterspells that are guaranteed to work. (even
Cancel
is better)
Lilting Refrain
is also very bad for very similar reasons. On top of telegraphing your play, it also can't counter a spell until a turn after you play it. It most likely won't be able to counter a spell until two or three turns after you play it. If you ran some recursion effects or proliferate effects, it might be salvageable, but currently its just really bad.
Declaration of Naught
is pretty bad too, its reusable against commanders, but its also costing you to counter one spell. Your only hand peek is
Telepathy
, and you run no blink effects to reset Declaration to abuse it.

I'm very confused by your
Primal Surge
choices. Designing your deck around Primal Surge working to not its full potential is just astonishing. Why even include it at all? Especially since you can actually lose from casting it, due to the nature of many enchantress effects that do not specify the word may for those draws. Casting a 10 mana spell should guarantee you are going to win, but it doesn't in this deck.

I feel similarly about
Hive Mind
. The potential for this card blowing up in your face is so high. Ideally, you pair this card with instants and sorceries that your opponents wouldn't want to cast at all. I understand you run a small instant/sorcery count, but that once again means you're relying on an opponent to help you get to your own win, otherwise you just wasted 6 mana on a card that does nothing with the other 98 cards you put in the deck. This card is never going to benefit you when you are ahead, it just means any piece of removal played becomes 3 pieces of removal against your board state.

1 month ago

“I lack knowledge of cEDH (I only do casual/semi-competitive) but how much politics really are there?”

Like I started to say last night before I got super tired realizing how long it would take to throw my two cents in here, if you’re playing against more than one player, you’re playing politics. I would go so far as to say if you’re dueling there’s some politics involved.

Right now, any given deck I have can sit at any table and compete regardless of what anyone else is doing. That’s because I’m not playing against those decks; I’m playing against those players. Unless you’re some kind of goddamned genius who can math a whole game out on the first play of the game, you can’t math your way to a win in a pod. So you have to play the players.

Also, yea cEDH is a thing, but I don’t put much stock in that. I’ve played shit that shouldn’t compete but does, and I’ve played competitive shit that gets owned. I heard somewhere (don’t ask me where) that you should only expect to win about 25% of your edh games if you play in 4-pods, but I win a little more than that on a typical game day playing against competitive people with serious collections. Long story short, it’s more how much knowledge of the game you have and politics than almost anything else. I’d say deck is the other half if it’s good, polished, and you run it well, but less if those aren’t true.

“Everyone is playing something threatening. How do you even determine threat assessment in a meta like that, let alone politics?”

This ranking is probably the best way I can break down threats. It’s not comprehensive but it’s a basic idea of how I value cards in a typical game.

A-Rank: WILL CAUSE YOU TO LOSE THE FUCKING GAME. KILL IT WITH FIRE. Your entire existence becomes devoted to dealing with this shit or convincing someone else to do it so everyone doesn’t lose. Some loose examples: a noticeable combo on the stack, a slow but repeatable loop,
Paradox Engine
,
Omniscience
,
Doubling Season
, lock pieces, soft lock pieces, and infinite mana. Also, just personally:
Mindslaver
or
Telepathy
. I fuck anyone who plays that shit up right away, and fuck you for playing it!

C-Rank: basically everything else: the filler that helps polish decks (tutors,
Rhystic Study
, etc), utility lands, etc. It’s the shit you decided to include to help fuel your win condition. It’s typically good but not necessarily a threat.

“Just trying to understand your position as I don't have much experience with cEDH.”

I honestly can’t stress enough about personal learning of this game. It’s difficult to see where you made mistakes, especially if nobody is there to point them out or help you. But taking the time to reflect a little (internally or with friends; this is a social game) goes a long way. So maybe you don’t “cEDH”, but I bet you’ve had some crazy games with fuckin dumb interactions that took 15 minutes to resolve. Learn from that shit :-)

“I'm sure the blue player would be cool with you beating T&T to death since Flash Hulk, but then once flash hulk dies, you have to face terefi and deveri on ur own.”

Yea I don’t worry about all that. I can only play the deck that I’m playing. This statement probably won’t be helpful, but I can kind of just “see” what needs to happen. I think a lot of it comes with experience, and some of it in knowing decks and cards that decks are probably playing, but the best way to win is to know your deck, play it well, and play around the shit everyone else is doing so that you can keep doing your stuff. Someone dropped
Rest in Peace
? You can still take beatdown boulevard. Someone playing heavy counters? Probably can’t counter everything, so gang up on them luring it all out and land something gross. Meta adjusts to hate you because you’re becoming “that guy”? Adjust accordingly. It’s a dynamic game and there’s always more to learn (
Chains of Mephistopheles
interactions or
Faerie Artisans
, for instance).

2 months ago

This one you need to be holding counters for, so it's de facto more complicated then I prefer. Basically you use the stack with this one so sequence is everything. 1: Play Lab Man 2:Activate a draw a card caged ability or play a card draw spell 3: In response, activate Mairsil's caged MMP ability and shuffle Mairsil into your deck 4: Put your entire deck into your graveyard since a card named "Mirror-Mad Phantasm" is not in your deck (the wording on the ability reverts back to "mirror-Mad Phantasm" as soon as Mairsil leaves play, even though the ability is on the Stack. 5: The card draw resolves and you win because you have no card to draw and Lab Man is on board.

The additional advantage of running the Phantasm is that he acts as a risky AF version of
Traumatize
ing yourself if you cast him and activate. You may reveal him ten cards from the top, but also maybe 80 cards from the top.

Technically not game ending and slightly mana intensive but once you have demonstrated that unless the opponents can remove Mairsil you have established a lock all but the most stubborn opponents will scoop.

Technically not a Mairsil combo but synergizes with many cards you will be running anyway, specifically
Buried Alive
. I have found this combo makes the deck far more deadly because it 1: Doesn't rely on the Commander and 2: Is incredibly hard to interfere with. If you need an explanation of how it works, ask and I'll elaborate but it's a pretty well known combo that appears in a lot of decks. I definitely recommend running
Chainer, Dementia Master
and possibly some GY recursion like
Reanimate
and
Animate Dead
though if you're going to run this.

On the subject of the wheels and Niv-Mizzet/ Locust God/ you forgot Nekusar. You could just do that as a different deck TBH.If I was going to play one, and you should be hard up for slots by this point really so I would only pick one, I'd go with Locust God as he provides chump blockers and if removed can be caged. Also, most smart players will remove Nekusar on sight.

As for counters: Perfect. Turn Aside and Negate are exactly the type of cards I'm talking about.

You're right. Most of the cuts have to do with the fact they're infinite mana enablers but not much use besides that. As for the two you specifically mentioned, Deadeye is just a personal bias. I think his CMC is too high in a deck where mana, especially blue mana, is such a precious resource. He's amazing when you can get him online (though not perfect, he doesn't do anything against board wipes) my concern is getting him on board able to protect himself AND Mairsil from one removal spell is 8 mana. Think of it this way, if Deadeye Nav said "to cast this card tap all your lands and skip this turn you may not cast instants or play abilities until your next turn" would you play him? I imagine the answer is no, but that is pretty much his casting cost in a deck where keeping a few lands open as much as possible is so important.

As for the poltergeist, your protection via caged effects should be limited to the littlest slots possible, this deck is trying to accomplish alot and 100 card syndrome hits is hard and even though Cavern Harpy and
Thalakos Scout
are 100 times better as caged protection, even that is not the best case scenario. This deck CAN live without Aetherling, but it is arguably the most important card in the deck. Protecting Mairsil doesn''t amount to much if you aren't caging things while you do it. I'm looking at Poltergeist and going "That slot could be a
Corpse Connoisseur
that gets me Aetherling or a combo piece" (This is where your deck durdling comes in)

Finally, here's my suggestions to add in terms of creatures and I'll give each a quick purpose blurb

Anyway, that's all I have for now. Once again, check out the MTG Muddstah video's featuring Harry's Mairsil deck, you'll find it very enlightening. Hope you start enjoying the deck more and let me know how it works out if you stick with it.

2 months ago

2 months ago

Telepathy occurrence in decks from the last year

Commander / EDH:

All decks: 0.01%

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